Trump's Changes to Immigration Could Take Years to Undo — Even With a New President

As the 2020 presidential contest ramps up, President Trump is doubling down on restricting immigration to the U.S. — a key campaign pledge he made during his first run for the White House and one that he is hoping will earn him a second term. For many voters, immigration could be a defining issue in November — whether they support or oppose his policies.

In his first week in office in January 2017, Trump issued a series of directives to dramatically increase border enforcement, expand detention and deportation of immigrants and halt refugee resettlement. The president often speaks of immigrants as “dangerous” and a threat to Americans, using words like “criminals” and calling a migrant caravan an “invasion.”

Now, three years on, the transformation of federal immigration policy has been far-reaching, touching legal immigrants and asylum-seekers as well as immigrants in the country without authorization.

Trump’s antagonists, including California political leaders, have filed scores of lawsuits blocking many of the administration’s immigration moves — at least temporarily. But judges have allowed other policies to take effect, even as legal challenges work their way through federal courts.

Trump’s harsh rhetoric and restrictive policies present a stark contrast with the Democratic field of presidential candidates. But analysts say the scope of the changes made by the Trump administration is so broad that the effects are likely to endure for years, even if the president is not reelected.

The administration’s enforcement push comes at a time when illegal immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border is far lower than it was 20 years ago. And most undocumented immigrants have lived in the U.S. for a decade or more.

Meanwhile, just 577,000 immigrants were granted lawful permanent residence last year, far fewer than any time in the past two decades, when the U.S. issued roughly 1 million green cards annually.

‘One of the Major Eras of Xenophobia?’

Some immigration scholars say this presidency is more hostile to immigrants than any in modern history, while advocates who favor tougher immigration policies applaud Trump’s approach.

UC Davis School of Law Dean Kevin R. Johnson contrasted the current era with the 1950s, when more than 1 million Mexicans were rounded up in a mass deportation campaign.

“Even when he put in place Operation Wetback, President Eisenhower didn’t talk about immigrants the way this president does,” Johnson said. “The talk about race, and the fear created in immigrant communities, are what differentiates this president.”

“In a historical sense, it represents one of the major eras of xenophobia,” said University of San Francisco law professor Bill Ong Hing, comparing this period to the 1920s.

Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, said that while Trump’s language is “coarse,” she gives him high marks for clamping down “to de-incentivize people streaming up to the border, thinking they’d be released into the interior.”

“Almost every part of our immigration system has been touched,” added Vaughn, whose center favors reducing immigration.

Meanwhile, public opinion polls show that most Americans support border security as well as a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and they favor taking in refugees of war and violence.

Little Tweaks, Huge Policy Implications

So far, immigration changes under Trump have not been enshrined in new laws.

Instead, he has used his executive authority, like other presidents before him, to accomplish his goals.

“Little tweaks have huge policy implications,” said Sarah Pierce, an immigration policy analyst at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. “So any future administration that’s more friendly to immigration is going to require decades to reverse this.”

Here’s a look at what those changes add up to:

— Trying to build a border wall

President Trump’s pledge to build a wall on the Mexican border galvanized enthusiasm among his supporters, but it has proven difficult — and costly.

Congress approved much less money than Trump requested — $1.3 billion in the 2020 spending bill, rather than $8.6 billion. Despite legal challenges, conservative court majorities have recently allowed construction to move ahead.

As of January, the government had built one mile of new barrier and 100 miles of replacement or secondary fencing — at a cost of almost $20 million per mile, NPR reported.

— Restricting access to asylum

The administration may not have gotten far with a physical wall, but it has succeeded in erecting a virtual wall of regulations, blocking tens of thousands of migrants from being considered for asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border.

For example: Over the past year, border officials sent about 60,000 non-Mexicans back to Mexico to wait while their asylum cases are decided in U.S. immigration courts. It’s next to impossible for migrants in the so-called Remain in Mexico program to find U.S. immigration lawyers, and fewer than 200 have won their cases.

And last year, a new rule shut out all asylum-seekers who crossed a “third country” en route to the U.S. but didn’t ask for protection there.

Federal courts have allowed both policies to take effect while lower courts hear legal challenges.

— Separating families and zero tolerance

Removing migrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border was one of the Trump administration’s most controversial steps — and prompted a broad, bipartisan backlash.

The separations began after then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a “zero tolerance” policy aimed at criminally prosecuting all adults — including parents — who cross the border illegally.

In 2018, a federal judge in San Diego halted the separations and ordered the reunification of families. More than 18 months later, perhaps as many as 2,000 of the more than 5,500 separated children still have not been reunited with their parents.

— Pushing to end DACA 

Since 2012, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals has granted temporary protection from deportation — and permission to work — to more than 800,000 young undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children.

In 2017, the Trump administration moved to end DACA, calling it an overreach of President Barack Obama’s executive power. The University of California and others sued, and federal judges have kept the program in place while the case is appealed. The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule this spring.

There are currently about 650,000 DACA recipients and nearly 200,000 of them live in California.

— Broadening immigration enforcement

With an executive order in his first days in office, Trump wiped away Obama’s deportation priorities, which had focused on violent criminals and recent border crossers. Instead, Trump made just about any “removable alien” a priority.

As a result, the share of immigrants arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement who had no criminal record grew — from 14% in 2016 to 36% last year, according to Pierce of the Migration Policy Institute.

— Restricting legal immigration 

In January, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the administration may expand the so-called “public charge” rule, even as that’s being challenged in court. The rule is a sweeping effort to restrict lower-income immigrants from becoming permanent U.S. residents.

The government has long denied green cards to people who used substantial cash assistance from the government. Now the rule applies to immigrants who have used, or might use, many more non-cash benefits, including food stamps and MediCal — even for short periods. San Francisco and Santa Clara counties filed the first challenge to the rule, saying it could hurt the U.S. citizen children of immigrants.

— Refugee and humanitarian restrictions

President Trump has slashed the number of refugees the U.S. will admit annually — from 85,000 when he was elected, to a historic low of 18,000 for 2020.

The administration has also tried to terminate Temporary Protected Status for citizens of six countries allowed to stay in the U.S. following war or natural disaster. Roughly 400,000 TPS holders could face deportation.

A federal judge in San Francisco has temporarily blocked the administration from ending TPS for people from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, Sudan, Honduras and Nepal. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is deciding whether to allow that injunction to stand.

— Aiming to expand detention of children

Children in immigration custody are protected by the Flores settlement agreement. It says children should be released to an adult sponsor — but if they remain in custody, it must be in a licensed child care facility, not a jail-like setting.

In 2015, a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled that kids must be released promptly from ICE family detention centers, generally within 20 days. Last year, the Trump administration published federal rules aimed at replacing Flores and permitting long-term family detention, which the L.A. judge blocked.

Meanwhile, six migrant children died of illness in federal custody between September 2018 and May 2019.

— Tightening pressure on immigration courts

The Justice Department, which oversees immigration courts, has tried to speed up deportations by setting a quota requiring judges to complete 700 cases a year.

Then-Attorney General Sessions also stripped authority from immigration judges, barring them from dismissing or suspending low-priority cases. Sessions also ordered judges to reopen more than 300,000 cases that had been administratively closed. That’s on top of a historic backlog of more than 1 million cases.

Immigration judges say their limited discretion and the pressure to close cases faster is creating an “unbearable” work environment and threatening due process for immigrants.

Political Implications

How lasting President Trump’s immigration restrictions prove will largely depend on the 2020 election, and who wins not just the presidency but also control of Congress.

In his State of the Union speech in early February, Trump emphasized his push to build a border wall, his opposition to sanctuary cities and his agreements that turn back asylum-seekers at the border.

It’s a strategy that Jessica Vaughan, with the conservative Center for Immigration Studies, believes will be popular.

“People are insistent that the laws be enforced. That’s a strength for him going into this election and he knows it,” she said. “We’re going to see him keep doing things he thinks are going to play well with voters.”

But others believe Trump’s tough-on-immigrants approach could backfire this year, even though it worked for him in 2016.

Matt Barreto, a professor of political science at UCLA and co-founder of the Latino Decisions polling firm, said polls show Latino and immigrant voters are angry over the president’s racially polarizing language, family separations and the deaths of migrant children in federal custody.

“No one’s in favor of putting kids in cages and giving them space blankets,” Barreto said. “It’s a hard thing to sell.”

Robust Latino turnout in 2018 helped flip at least a dozen congressional seats from Republican to Democrat, according to Barreto’s research, and it could play a big role in this year’s general election.

“I think on Super Tuesday we’ll get a really big clue,” he said. “We’ll have [primaries in] Texas and California both. If the turnout is really robust we’ll see that people are amped up and ready to participate.”

If Trump is reelected, Vaughan and others expect him to put forward a major immigration bill crafted by presidential adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner. The proposal codifies many restrictive enforcement measures and favors high-skilled immigrants over family-based immigration.

For advocates and politicians, immigration is intensely polarizing, said Theresa Cardinal Brown, director of immigration policy at the centrist Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

“Immigration is now ranking up amongst those insoluble, intractable issues like abortion and gun control,” she said. “There’s no middle ground that people will admit to … And that’s highly problematic for an issue like immigration that has to be legislated.”

But she believes that public opinion is more nuanced.

“People believe in a middle ground,” she said. “They say, ‘Sure we can secure our borders, but we can also have compassion for immigrants. Sure we can tighten our legal immigration system, but that doesn’t mean we have to break up families.’ ”